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I Heard the News Today
For All Nails #166: I Heard the News Today by Mike Keating (Thanks to Noel Maurer for his advice and experience with broadcast copy.) ---- :NABC network feed, 10:00 PM EST :18 April 1975 :Graphic on screen, with theme music: :NABC Nightly Report with Jeremy Bonner ANNOUNCER: NABC Nightly Report for Friday, April 18, 1975. Here is Jeremy Bonner. BONNER (seated at anchor desk): Good evening. A shocking act of violence early this morning has destroyed a Confederation office building in Endicott, New York. Current reports indicate no one was killed or hurt by the blast, which appears to have been deliberately timed to avoid any casualties. For more, we now go live to our correspondent Neil McCombs, live in Endicott, New York. CUT to a shot of McCombs standing outside the well-lit wreckage of the CNA building in Endicott. Workers can be seen going through the ruins. McCOMBS: Thank you, Jeremy. I'm standing here by the ruins of the Confederation Building in downtown Endicott. According to CBI spokesmen, the building was destroyed by the detonation of a large van loaded with explosives parked outside. As far as we know, at around one-thirty this morning two men claiming to be maintenance workers gained entry to the back door of the building. CUT to a closeup of a man in a security guard's uniform. Text at the bottom of the screen identifies him as Robert Stahl. STAHL: They showed me a work order for cleaning the ventilation. Said it was going to be noisy and they'd been asked to do it at night when no one would have their work disturbed. It looked very real. I took them to the lobby to make sure the other guards knew. Next thing I knew, they pulled out guns and shot us. CUT to a slow camera pan over the ruins, taken during the daytime. McCOMBS (in voiceover): No maintenance was scheduled, according to building staff we talked to. The guns appear to have been tranquilizer guns. The perpetrators apparently removed the guards to a park three blocks away before detonating the explosives. The security cameras had somehow been sabotaged ten minutes before that. Images were visible on the monitors at the security desk, but the recording had stopped. As a result, no vitatape evidence is available. CBI investigators are currently looking at how the sabotage might have been done. CUT to a shot of a CBI agent at a portable podium, speaking to many reporters. Text at the bottom of the screen identifies him as Burgoyne Redding, Chief Superintendent for the Endicott CBI field office. REDDING: We are looking at whether the perpetrators tampered with the building's camera recording system. Evidence on this may be difficult to obtain due to the heavy damage. CUT back to McCombs. McCOMBS: When asked as to the possibility of inside help on gaining entry to the building and in sabotaging the recording equipment, Redding had no comment. CUT back to Redding. REDDING: We found pieces of three locomobiles belonging to the guards in the wreckage. We also found pieces of a van not belonging to any of them, or anyone authorized to be in the building. Traces of high-grade explosive were found, and we feel the van was filled with it. We are working at this time to trace the origin of the van through Locomobile Identification Numbers. We are also working with descriptions the guards gave us. CUT back to McCombs. BONNER (in voiceover): Neil, are there any leads as to who was responsible for this bombing? McCOMBS: Well, informed sources say the CBI does have several different leads. The most promising so far involve the so-called 'army clubs' that have sprung up in and around the Northern Confederation over the last few years. These clubs are hotbeds of radicalism and their members appear to mythologize the North American Rebellion: our sources have noted that today is in fact the 200th anniversary of the start of the Rebellion. BONNER: Neil, is there any evidence of foreign involvement in this attack? McCOMBS: No, Jeremy, there has not been any word on that at this time. CBI spokesman have mentioned that they currently have no reason to connect this attack with the Bali bombing. CUT back to Bonner. BONNER: Neil, the CBI lost its own facilities in this bombing. How are they running the investigation? CUT back to McCombs. McCOMBS: Well, Jeremy, the local and provincial militias have been more than willing to lend a hand, with use of their labs, facilities, and manpower. We have been told that other CBI offices are assisting with the investigation. CUT back to Bonner. BONNER: We look forward to hearing what they find out. Thank you, Neil. ---- :New Orleans, Georgia :18 April 1975 :10:06 PM Daniel Henry thought his boss had it all worked out. Mailing the claim of responsibility from nowhere near the scene of the crime or his own area of work made sense. Mailing it from a place that the army clubs couldn't be remotely connected to was brilliant. If you are going to own up to the crime, leave the CBI as little evidence as possible. They might crack down, but they would have trouble prosecuting individuals for this. He dropped the letters, one to each of the network news divisions, in the mailbox. ---- Forward to FAN #167: A Message From Big Brother. Forward to 25 April 1975: We're a Happy Family. Forward to Vitavision: What's on the Vita Then? Forward to Harold Pickett: Bullet the Blue Sky. Return to For All Nails. Category:Pickett Category:Vitavision